Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse.

In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for agency.

The most extreme recent examples can be found in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. On November 30, 2023, the Supreme Court of Russia classified the LGBTQ community as "extremist", enabling the use of anti-terror legislation as a tool of oppression against LGBTQ individuals. A similar tendency can be observed in Hungary, which on April 15, 2025, criminalized Pride marches. In this context, we also see a rhetorical strategy that has been used by right-wing extremists in the past: namely, the claim that Pride marches are dangerous for children or sexualize children. There is, of course, no scientific support for such claims, but—much like Foucault described—these assertions are nonetheless presented as "scientific truths".

This invocation of children is also interesting in light of Lee Edelman’s work. In his book No Future, Edelman argues that it is nearly impossible to argue against someone who claims to act "in the best interest of the child", since children symbolically represent the future of the nation. This is precisely the line of argumentation used in Hungary, where it has been claimed that it is more important to protect the “moral and physical development” of the country than to uphold freedom of speech.

The cases of Russia and Hungary can be seen as particularly crude forms of biopower, where the law is enforced through external pressure, such as police intervention. However, in Sweden we can observe a softer—but still troubling—form of power. In this regard, two separate public inquiries have addressed the issue of sex education in Sweden. A few years ago, a new policy was introduced into the Swedish education system that emphasized “sexuality, consent, and relationships” as priority topics across all education. However, a public inquiry into teacher education (SOU 2024:81, p. 398) stated that these themes do not need to be part of the core goals of teacher training, but can instead be assumed to be included through the general educational policy framework.

In another inquiry, dealing with the general educational curriculum (SOU 2025:19, pp. 234–235), the topic of “sexuality, consent, and relationships” was downgraded from a general educational goal to a theme addressed in specific course syllabi. This change shifts responsibility from the school as an institution to the individual teacher, effectively resulting in a deprioritization of sex education. One risk of this is that students will receive less knowledge about sexuality and gender expression, thereby limiting their own capacity for agency and understanding. While this change may have been unintentional, it is still likely to have significant consequences.

This example further highlights how the construction of sexuality takes place not only within medical science, but also in educational settings—an observation closely aligned with Foucault’s thinking.